Book Depository Blog

The Pulitzer Prize winners have been announced (go to pulitzer.org for the full break down):

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction: Tinkers by Paul Harding: "An old man lies dying. Confined to bed in his living room, he sees the walls around him begin to collapse, the windows come loose from their sashes, and the ceiling plaster fall off in great chunks, showering him with a lifetime of debris: newspaper clippings, old photographs, wool jackets, rusty tools, and the mangled brass works of antique clocks..."

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry: Versed by Rae Armantrout: "The poems in the first section, 'Versed', play with vice and versa, the perversity of human consciousness. They flirt with error and delusion, skating on a thin ice that inevitably cracks. In the second section, 'Dark Matter', the invisible and unknowable are confronted directly as Armantrout's experience with cancer marks these poems with a new austerity, shot through with her signature wit and stark unsentimental thinking..."

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Biography: The First Tycoon - The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt by T.J. Stiles: "Founder of a dynasty, builder of the original Grand Central, creator of an impossibly vast fortune, Cornelius 'Commodore' Vanderbilt is an American icon. Humbly born on Staten Island during George Washington's presidency, he rose from boatman to builder of the nation's largest fleet of steamships to lord of a railroad empire...

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction: The Dead Hand - The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy by David E Hoffman: "During the Cold War, world superpowers amassed nuclear arsenals containing the explosive power of one million Hiroshimas. The Soviet Union secretly plotted to create the "Dead Hand," a system designed to launch an automatic retaliatory nuclear strike on the United States, and developed a fearsome biological warfare machine. President Ronald Reagan, hoping to awe the Soviets into submission, pushed hard for the creation of space-based missile defenses..."

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for History: Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World by Liaquat Ahamed: "With penetrating insights for today, this vital history of the world economic collapse of the late 1920s offers unforgettable portraits of the four men whose personal and professional actions as heads of their respective central banks changed the course of the twentieth century..."